Franz Kafka in Prague
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2024
- On July 3rd, 1883, in Prague, the Jewish, German speaking, bohemian author, Franz Kafka, was born.
Prague is both important and immaterial to understanding the work of Kafka. It's immaterial because although we can map locations in Prague to locations in Kafka's fiction, Kafka doesn't generally describe those places in detail or name them, instead creating a more ephemeral sense of a city that could be almost anywhere.
But Prague is also important to understanding Kafka because he lived practically his entire life here and in quite a contained part of the city that had an enormous impact on him.
This video was filmed in March 2024.
"his work is simply human, and it belongs to all of us" such a great line and a great video!
Thanks, Lindsey! I don't script these videos much in advance (I really should, but I'm not that organised!) so a lot of what I say comes to me on the day / on location... glad that line worked for you!
damn fine video, just stumbled on your channel and thanks for this tour, ever since I learned of Kafka, his personality, themes etc, how we was unrecognized in his lifetime, I have been fascinated. Love from Denmark.
Thanks! Really appreciate the nice comment and you stumbling on this channel. I'm exactly the same re: Kafka. I had read The Metamorphosis years ago but recently supervised a Master's student working on Kafka and that led me to read much more of his work and Nicholas Murray's biography. Sometimes people just talk about Kafka as "weird" and "unsettling" but he's much more deeper and more varied than that. One day I'd like to go back to Czechia and do a video exploring his writing of "The Castle." I might also do a video about Kafka in Oxford (where I'm based). There's a lot going on here at the moment, for the 100th anniversary, including an exhibition of his manuscripts in the Bodleian (most of his manuscripts are held in Oxford).
Thanks again for visiting and commenting!
Great video, thank you!
Great video. Is it true that, before dying, Kafka asked all his writings to be burned?
Thanks so much! And yes, that's right. He wrote to his friend Max Brod and asked him to burn everything. He also asked his last lover, Dora, to burn some of his work and notebooks which she did in front of him (but actually held some back in secret. However, these were unfortunately seized by the Nazis later on, and went missing). Brod rejected Kafka's wishes for two reasons: 1) Kafka had already asked him and he had already refused, so Brod reasoned that Kafka KNEW he wasn't going to do it and therefore wasn't really asking him to do it when he made the request a second time in his Last Will, and 2) the work was just too good to burn (it included, among other things, Kafka's three unpublished novels which otherwise would have been entirely lost).
It's still unclear to me how serious Kafka was in the request, and to what extent it was his depression and anxiety speaking. Dora wrote: "Time and again he said: 'Well, I wonder if I've escaped the ghosts?' This was the name with which he summarized everything that had tormented him before he came to Berlin. He was as though possessed by this idea; it was a kind of sullen obstinacy. He wanted to burn everything he had written in order to free his soul from these "ghosts". I respected his wish, and when he lay ill, I burnt things of his before his eyes. What he really wanted to write was to come afterwards, only after he had gained his "liberty". Literature for him was something sacred, absolute, incorruptible, something great and pure."
It sounds to me as if he just wanted to be free of his work and requesting its destruction when he was dying (and he was ill for about 7 years) was a way of letting go. But it's a difficult one to assess and respond to. Similar thing happened to Terry Pratchett (he requested that all the drafts on his hard-drive be destroyed, which they were!)
A wonderful video and although I have visited Prague you have unearthed to me a side of the city that I didn’t know about.
Thanks, David! Glad I could show you a different side to Prague... and of course there's many other sides to see! I do love it there.
It is a great video.
Looking forward to seeing videos about other philosophers.
Thanks so much! My videos are about authors but there's definitely a lot of overlap with philosophy as well... Kafka is a great example of that.
I enjoyed this video, it makes me want to take the time to get to know Kafka better.
(I also would like to know what the food on the plate at 3:10 is?)
Kafka is definitely worth getting to know! Glad you liked the video. I'm afraid I can't remember what the dish I ate at Cafe Louvre was called, but it was very good.